What people remember tells you more than any survey

When I took my first People Experience role at a scaling startup, the last thing I wanted was for people to think of me as HR.

That might sound odd. But I'd come from UX, where I was embedded in product teams, constantly learning from engineers, designers and product managers. I'd seen HR teams become siloed before, disconnected from the day-to-day reality of how work actually gets done. I didn't want that for myself.

I wanted to stay connected to the people in the business, not just the People team. I wanted to keep learning about product and UX principles from the people around me. And I wanted the work I did to be grounded in real insight about what people were actually experiencing, not assumptions made from behind a desk.

So instead of starting with best practice frameworks or an audit of existing HR processes, I did something that felt more natural to me as a UXer.

I went and spoke to people to find out what it was like to work there and what could be improved.

Why surveys alone aren't enough

Many organisations run engagement surveys on top of this to understand which aspects of the employee lifecycle are working well and which ones feel a bit broken.

And surveys have their place. But they're limited.

When I looked at our engagement survey results, I could see that some of our lowest-scoring questions were around career progression and compensation. At face value, I could have jumped straight to building a career progression matrix and an employee handbook explaining how salary decisions were made.

But what the survey didn't tell me was why people felt that way or how it impacted their experience of work or their ability to do a good job.

Surveys give you themes and a bit of direction. But conversations give you the nuance that helps you understand what’s really going on.

What I learned by talking to our people

I held 15-minute conversations with people from across the business and asked them one question: What have been the most memorable moments during your time here and why?

The themes that came up, time and time again, weren't what I expected.

The biggest one was around delivering valuable work. Whenever someone felt they had delivered something of value, that was the moment that left the most lasting impression.

Not onboarding. Not performance reviews. The day-to-day experience of work.

Conversely, when they felt blocked or unable to do a good job, that also left a lasting impression.

When I dug into what enabled or blocked a feeling of being able to do a good job, it came down to whether or not they had a positive experience of:

• 🎯 receiving clear expectations of what was part of their role and what they would need to focus on to progress
• 💬 feedback with each other about what was enabling collaboration and what wasn't in a hybrid working environment
• 🌱 having a safe space with a mentor or manager to share the challenges they were facing and receive guidance or coaching in how to overcome them.

That's quite a lot more nuanced than what a survey can tell you.

If I'd only focused on the survey results, I might have jumped to build the typical HR tools or processes that ‘best practice’ would say would improve the associated survey result. Instead, by exploring the day-to-day experience of work, we changed our focus to building a roadmap focused on designing experiences:

• The experience of understanding where they can add the most value
• The experience of receiving recognition and feedback
• The experience of collaborating in a hybrid environment

This is what People Experience is about. It’s about learning what each stage of the employee's journey looks like from their perspective (rather than from an HR process perspective), including how they're feeling, what they expected, and where the gaps are between expectations and reality. Then, using that insight to prioritise work that focuses on the experience to create and solve the blockers to that experience, rather than delivering off-the-shelf HR processes.

Map both the employee experience AND the manager experience

One thing I'd encourage is to run these conversations with managers and leaders too, not just ICs. The experience of managing is its own journey, and the gaps between what leaders expect from their role and what they're actually experiencing often surface very different insights. Those insights can reshape your priorities just as much as what you hear from the wider team.

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How to make employee listening a sustainable activity (not a one-off)

If you're thinking "this sounds like a lot of effort," I hear you. Running qualitative conversations across the business can feel like a big lift, especially when you're already stretched.

This is where I think tools like Crewmojo become valuable, not for replacing the conversations, but for automating the rhythm around them.

For example, you could:

1. Set up a trigger for whenever someone has a work anniversary.
2. Invite them to a 15-minute coffee chat to mark the occasion and ask about their most memorable moments over the past year.
3. Then document the themes back in Crewmojo so you can track changes over time and spot experience gaps and their impact on the organisation's performance.

Rather than gathering all your qualitative data at one point in time (like an annual survey), you're building a continuous picture of the employee experience throughout the year.

This also shifts what your engagement survey needs to do. Instead of being your primary listening tool (heavy to analyse, slow to act on, and often leaving people feeling like nothing changes), the survey becomes something lighter: a way to measure the impact of changes you've already made or capture quantitative metrics. The qualitative insight comes from the ongoing conversations.

And this can scale. Start within the People team, then equip managers with a method for gathering feedback so they can iterate on their team's experience based on what they're hearing directly.

Start with one question

If you want to make a start on your own experience map, begin by asking people: What have been the most memorable moments of working here?

Keep an eye out for the experience gaps, the moments that aren't going as expected or that are going better than expected. And especially look for moments where a bunch of your people experience a moment as a pain point, and others experience it as a joyous moment - those situations often highlight inconsistencies in manager capability.

Use that data to help you prioritise the areas of experience to improve.

Focus on building a roadmap that centres on the experience instead of the process.

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